Zombieland

What you gonna do when your town – hell, your world – is besieged by zombies? Well, call Woody. Harrelson, that is (though we wouldn’t mind watching the Allen variety psychoanalysing the fucked-up undead for an hour or two). Harrelson may be the dippy funnyman we all remember from Cheers, but by all accounts he’s got one heck of a right hook. Just ask the paparazzo he landed a knuckle smash to in April this year. The actor’s excuse for the bust up? “I wrapped a movie called Zombieland, in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character. With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie.” Imagine that went down well at the station.

Filmed around Giorgia, USA, Zombieland pits a rag tag band of humans against an emerging army of flesh-munchers. But if you’re sensing a certain degree of ‘deja so?’, you’ve not seen Harrelson’s Tallahassee, a Steston-toting redneck at the centre of the wretched resistance. He’s also on a personal mission to find the last Twinkie on the planet. “Ma mother always told me, ‘Some day you’ll be good at something’,” simmers Tallahassee as he brandishes a rifle. “I don’t think she coulda guessed that somethin’ would be zombie killing.” The arsenal at his disposal? Machine guns, pianos, fairground rides… you name it, he’ll use it to bash in the brains of anything lacking a pulse.

So, could this be America’s steroid-pumped answer to that other renowned zom-com? Director Ruben Fleischer certainly believes so. “I like to think of it as Midnight Run with zombies,” he says. “It’s the story of these two unlikely people that go on a road trip together. Woody Harrelson is this zombie-killing badass and then Jesse Eisenberg is this sort of wimpy coward and they have both managed to survive.”

Rounding out the cast are a notably more mature Abigail Breslin, and current horror pin-up Amber Heard. Thus far we’ve only glimpsed the trailer, but with its mash up of zom-brats and comedy slow-mo chases (all set to Van Halen’s rocking ‘Everybody Wants Some’), Zombieland could just be the sleeper horror hit of 2009. As for the rumour that Bill Murray has a zombie cameo, Fleischer’s keeping schtum. “I guess you will just have to go see it!” Bet Tallahassee could get it out of him.